


Family Dynamics

by ELG



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Batcest, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 22:34:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9628235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: Jason is angry with Dick for letting him believe that he was dead. Dick is willing to do anything to make amends.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ankh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankh/gifts).



> Written just before my laptop crashed as a thank you to Ankh for looking after me when I was ill. Thought it was gone for good so posting it quickly while I have it back.
> 
> Implies past possible Bruce/Dick, Midnighter/Dick, Tiger/Dick, and Jason/Tim

Like Bruce, Jason is big all over, and Dick takes a moment to watch him as he swaggers out of the shower, that towel draped low on his hips. Broad shoulders, hard muscles—Jason likes people to think he is hard everywhere. He is taller and heavier and stronger than Dick is, which he tries not to be irked by, given that he is the eldest, but he hit five feet ten and stopped whereas Jason has just kept going. 

At the sight of his uninvited visitor, Jason’s eyes narrow. “You shouldn’t be here, Dickie-bird, not when I’m pissed with you.” He says nothing about Dick having traced where he is living and climbed in through a locked window. That is just the Robin way. None of them take much umbrage at that.

“I know you have every reason to be angry—” 

“I’m not Tim and I’m sure as hell not you. Puppy eyes don’t cut it with me, Grayson. If you’re still here in five minutes, I don’t care how pretty your face is, I’m going to break my fist on it.”

Of course, Dick understands. It’s the one unforgiveable sin—becoming Bruce. Tim has edged too close to that cliff on occasion and needed to be coaxed back, but now Dick has done worse. There is no point in making excuses, pointing out that he was still traumatized before Bruce started beating his own trauma into Dick’s body with his clenched fists, that he never could say ‘No’ to Bruce, and perhaps the fight had just gone out of him with Damian’s death anyway, even before Lex had smothered him until his heart stopped in that damn murder machine.

Jason carries his anger with him. It lends him a different kind of grace. The Robins all have their own body language: Damian is feline, deadly, having to stop himself at the end of his dynamic maneuver from striking the killing blow; Tim thinks through all the angles, reason in his actions, good physics underlying every move; Jason is always angry and sometimes careless, bludgeoning where Bruce would use one measured blow; Dick is fluid, graceful, liking to improvise; the one who jumps without a net. He knows Jay’s temper is frayed right now. He knows that coming here is asking for a beating. He wonders if that’s what he wants from his brother right now: absolution through pain. Being raised by Batman is bound to leave a mark.

“You’re faster but I’m stronger,” Jason reminds him over his shoulder as he closes the window and locks it again, lets the towel slide from his hips and uses another to keep drying his hair. “In a confined space where you can’t backflip your way out of trouble, I have the advantage.”

“Perhaps I want you to have the advantage.”

Dick keeps his distance because Jason’s anger is a third presence in the room. Bruce, of course, is a constant fourth. Neither of them know if Bruce has cameras in place. He might have done, before he lost his memory. It’s one of the things about being raised by him that one learns to live with—that there is probably some surveillance somewhere, that whatever one does, sooner or later, Bruce will probably know. Dick wonders if that’s how people think about God, the way he thinks about Batman—that he’s watching from somewhere and will notice if he screws up; will frown at him about it later while Dick lives with the sting of having disappointed him again.

Jason turns on him, and he is a big man now, Dick’s Little-Wing-that-was; his shoulders block the light from the lamp he left burning by the bedside, his body is hard and strong with muscle. Dick feels a flutter in his pulse as Jason looms over him. He suspects Jason is too angry at his betrayal to remember what Dick never forgets whenever he is with his brothers—that he loves them more than life.

“Get out before I beat you bloody.” Jason comes at him with clenched fists and Dick stands his ground.

“I want you to do whatever you need to do to forgive me.”

Jason grabs him by the hair, slams him face-first against the wall, there’s just that fraction of hesitation, so it hurts but it doesn’t crack any bones. Angry with himself for that mercy, Jason grips his hair tighter, breath a hot reproach. “How could you let us think that you were dead? How could you do it to me? To Tim?”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have gone along with it, but Bruce said it was necessary to keep you all safe—”

Jason drags him across the room by the hair as Dick goes with it, yielding to the inevitability of his anger. Jason says furiously: “‘Bruce said’? That’s all it ever took with you. Whatever Bruce wants he has to have. And goody-goody little Dickie-bird will always, always give it to him. But we have rights, too, the other Robins, and you broke the fucking covenant when you took his side against us. If you had any idea how pissed I am with you right now….” There is more and Dick bows his head before that storm-break, knowing much of it is true. There is so much stored up anger, because Dick always chooses Bruce, even though he loves them as much, there is a thread binding him to all of them, but somehow Bruce’s pain stabs him to the heart. He can’t resist it; has no defense against it. Never has.

“He does love us,” he says.

Jason, he realizes, as the words break over him, has other issues, not just from being the less favored son, or the one that died and clawed his way out of his coffin, but a jealousy Dick never knew existed about Dick loving Bruce.

Jason pins him to the bed, saying hoarsely, “Do you let him fuck you literally as well as metaphorically, Dick? I mean, I’ve always assumed, but now I think I need to know.”

The truth is as fluid as Dick upon a rooftop. He would let any one of them seek comfort from his body if it would give them an hour of grace. He loves them and his love comes without reservations. So if they need to break their fists upon him, he can bear it, and if they need something else, he is perfectly willing to oblige. He and Bruce have discovered their boundaries are blurred on occasion; they are not perfect people; they have crossed some dangerous lines.

“Do you even know what answer you’re looking for, Jay?” he says gently.

He has succeeded in making Jason even angrier and hardly knows himself if that was his intention. He keeps his body slack and without resistance as Jason pulls his arms behind his back and crosses them at the wrists, ties them tight, lets Jason flip him onto his back and rip open his spandex. Still angry, Jason positions Dick as he wants him, bound arms underneath, slathers his hands in lubricant and slicks it over his poker-hard cock while making kindling eye contact.

“Get your hips up, circus boy. Show me how flexible you really are.”

It stills feels as if they’re brothers, playing double dare you. Dick meets his gaze and obligingly cants his hips up, wraps his legs around the small of Jason’s back. Up until the last minute, he thinks Jason might not go through with it.

Jason is as big as Bruce and so much angrier. 

“Ah!”

“Hurts?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

And yet the kiss is fiercely tender, Jason mouthing his bottom lip, urgent and intense as he gazes into his eyes. 

“You had no right,” Jason says. “No damn right at all.”

“To lie to you and Tim? I know. I’m sorry.” This time he doesn’t make the mistake of saying ‘But Bruce said…’. He likes to bring a quip to a fist fight, but that would be a provocation too far.

Jason thrusts, rough and deep and with angry focus, like he’s punishing both of them with every snap of his lean hips, but there’s a groan beneath every grunt—lonely and tortured and snagging at his throat—that makes Dick crane his head up and find his lips, mouth them gently, a kiss that both offers and pleads for absolution. Jason’s return kiss is savage in its intensity, taking them both by surprise, for a moment, Dick is left breathless by the force of it, that tongue in his mouth, hands in his hair, hips still wildly plunging so his body jolts like a speared fish; he’s buffeted and bruised by need and reproach and resentment and love.

“Don’t you dare…” Jason pants wildly, taking a moment amidst the chaos of his pumping hips and biting mouth, and fingers tugging at Dick’s hair, to slam his head down on the pillow. “Don’t you dare die on me again, Dick.”

“At least my death was quick. You were gone for years. Do you really think you weren’t missed…?”

“Shut up.” It’s more of a bite than a kiss, and Dick is jolted across the bed by the force of all the ways that Jason is tugging him up then slamming him down, while fucking him with less than perfect grace, shallow and breathless and almost slipping out, because his need to lay hands upon him, to tangle Dick’s hair and bruise his shoulders and squeeze his throat and then savage his mouth, is more driving than his need to be inside him finding a rhythm.

“We missed you every day, Jason.”

“Don’t answer for him! Bruce can talk for himself.”

Bruce is a wild red flag to Jason and yet there have been several occasions now, when there are no other Robins around to muddy the waters, when Bruce and Jason have managed to reach an entente. Dick knows because Alfred has told him and Alfred knows everything that matters.

Mildly, Dick says, “Not if he has to use more than three sentences. You know it nearly kills him if he exceeds his daily word allowance.”

Jason is so indignant that he slips right out, ribboning slickness across Dick’s scrotum, teasing his ass cheeks with the heavy slide of his cock, the wet readiness of the swollen tip. “This is no time for jokes!”

“Sorry.”

“You’d think with all those years of super intensive bat-training that you might have noticed that I’m punishing you.”

“I thought you were seducing me.”

Jason sits back on his haunches. “Who the fuck have you been dating while you were ‘dead’, Dick? Killer Croc?”

Briefly, Dick thinks of mentioning Midnighter, kidnapping, Russia, handcuffs, exciting acrobatics, too much vodka, and a shared bedroom in a bad motel they had left damp with a tell-tale stain. He feels an inner squirm at the memory that is half shame and half the excitement of a secret entirely his own. “No…one.”

“Have you been whoring around with men instead of redheads?” Given that Jason is both male and actively engaged in having sex with him, his fraternal indignation is nothing but funny. Dick firmly pushes an image of Midnighter in leather and Tiger in wet speedos out of his mind but can’t quite repress his amusement. 

“And stop smirking!”

“It’s just that your hypocrisy is currently visible from the Watchtower. You should probably give the Martian Manhunter a wave.”

Jason’s hand clamps down across his mouth and he begins licking and nipping down Dick’s body with a vigor both punishing and seductive. If his intent is to reduce Dick to a whimpering spine arch, mostly bereft of breath or reason, he is entirely successful. Turning Dick into a panting squirm of sweaty arousal definitely improves Jason’s mood and he straddles him in satisfaction.

“I’m going to ride you like a unicycle, Circus Boy.”

“Promises, promises.”

“Do you even like sex? Or do you just like making people happy?”

Dick honestly doesn’t understand the question; the sensations are pleasurable in part because someone he cares for is getting pleasure from him. “Of course I like sex. What’s not to like?”

Jason, the ex-street kid, raises a cynical eyebrow and says that no wonder Dick is Bruce’s favorite. “Five minutes with Mr. Sunshine and Puppies and even the brooding Batman can convince himself he isn’t a total screw up as a father and that the way he raised us was something close to sane.”

“I remember it intersecting with sanity on several occasions.”

Jason pushes up his leg to slap him on the ass; a sharp smack of palm to flesh that leaves a lingering sting and an unexpected thrill. “You have no right to be this well-adjusted. Getting tied up by bad guys is no kind of way to grow up.”

“Worked for me.”

“You were a child soldier!”

“I was an orphan and Bruce took me in and gave me a home and a purpose and a family who loved me. I wouldn’t exchange my time with him and Alfred for anything.”

“Sometimes I really want to smack the crap out of you, Grayson.”

If the words are entirely Jason’s, the throaty growl is Bruce-like enough to send another pulse of arousal through him. On missions, Dick is all active grace, and he can be as supple and active in the bedroom, but he is also a past master of limpid passivity; and as with Midnighter’s handcuffs, sometimes he lets the bonds that he could spring just hold him.

Jason pushes in, holding Dick’s gaze through the long slide, watching the pleasure-pain of the stretch in his open mouth and the flexing tongue-tip as Dick savors the intensity of it, licking his own lips to taste Jason as the cock slides home. Dick swallows and Jason nuzzles his throat; Dick can feel the bonds chafing his wrists where they’re pinned beneath him. Jason’s fingers slide up his thighs, knead his buttocks, lift him and spread him, so he is defenselessly open; Dick doesn’t tense; even as Jason pulls out then slides home, and despite himself Jason is gentle. Skillful. He fucks Dick with slow, possessive strokes, and Dick relaxes into it, letting him in as deep as he likes, while Jason kisses him brutally and gently, teasing his mouth, nipping his neck, laving his nipples, and all the way stretching and spreading him with those claiming thrusts.

“A part of you is always mine,” Jason says hoarsely. “Bruce may have seen you first, but I knew you before Tim. Before Damian. Don’t ever forget that.”

Dick feels just a twinge of concern about how bad things might get in ten years’ time if Damian grows up to be as possessive as Jason. He thinks those two have a brotherly bond still to forge that might be as strong as iron—the two who face the world unflinchingly even in its ugliest corners; the two willing to do what might need doing so that Tim and Dick never have to—Jason and Damian have it in them to be the best of brothers to one another; they both just really suck at sharing.

“Do you need to hear that I love you? I’ve always loved you and I always will. Even when you tie me up in my underwear and try to turn me into your personal telethon.”

“You should be grateful to Damian. He’s the only reason I left you the underwear. If it had just been you, I would have tied you up stark bollock naked and probably oiled you up for your close-up.”

Dick tries not to roll his eyes. “Jason—I’m tied up naked right now.”

“I noticed…” 

The tongue in his ear is hot and needy and arousing. He squirms and Jason smirks triumphantly, biting, licking, and fucking him, then flips Dick over with a mixture of impatience and careless strength, to tug up his hips and pound him with focused concentration, Jason’s hand on one shoulder, holding him still. It’s rougher than Dick is used to, something in it that feels copied from some porno Jason probably watched last week, and he tries to tell himself this is just something he is going along with for Jason’s sake, but heat is gathering in him, breath catching in his throat, the rougher and faster Jason gets, the more it feels meaningful, because this is Jason punishing him for dying and for lying, and warning him never to do either of those things again. There is love in it, and the friction is glorious. He is nothing but aroused, making each rough slide over his prostate a match-strike; he bites the pillow to try to stifle the needy moans so as to not indulge Jason’s insufferable smugness or the tom-cat confidence of his rapid ball-slap against Dick’s ass.

Jason comes with a quiet grunt and a mouthing gasp to the back of Dick’s neck. The hand in Dick’s hair tugs his head back and they kiss, sweaty and panting, a fumbling of tongues, while Jason stays in him, still half-hard.

Dick manages breathlessly, “Am I forgiven?”

“Maybe by morning.”

“Tell me you’re kidding?”

“Hey, some of us are in our sexual prime.”

“You know, you could watch stuff that isn’t porn from time to time.”

Jason watched movies with Bruce, he knows that, did regular teenage stuff to try to heal the wounds of all the irregular teenage stuff inflicted on him before; unfortunately, Bruce’s idea of ‘regular teenager’ would also have involved bondage in the batcave, because it’s important to be able to get out of knots when bad guys are always tying you up. Jason resents it now, even though it wowed him then, that the man who took him in wasn’t just a regular guy, but a superhero. There is a part of him that will never be done blaming Bruce for not being Ward Cleaver instead of the Dark Knight, even though Jason would have made a Ward Cleaver’s life hell, always running out once the moon was up to look for a hero to follow who lived life on the fraying edge of a zip-line, batarang poised to slice.

Jason kisses him hard, then soft, then hard again. “One of us has to be the bad boy. Family dynamics require it. Better me than Damian. You can still save him.”

There is something wistful and resentful in the way he says the name of their youngest brother and Dick sighs inwardly, because Jason blames Dick for saving Damian from himself but not being able to save Jason.

“I didn’t save him. He died, remember? Saving me.” He isn’t over it. He will never, ever be over it. He can smile and be the way they always were together but he sees it too often when he closes his eyes; waking up with his head reeling to find the little brother he had been joking with a few minutes’ before, broken and dead. He had thought losing Bruce was as bad as life got but losing Damian had done something to his spirit; when the members of that Evil Justice League had paraded his beaten body before the massed ranks of the inmates of Arkham Asylum, he had realized, there was some resistance he usually relied on that just wasn’t there. It had taken Lex killing him to make him realize that even with Damian gone he didn’t want to die; he just wanted Damian back. “I never thanked you—you and Tim helped Bruce get him back. I can’t… Jay, I lost you, and then when you came back, you weren’t the Jason I remembered, and then Bruce was dead…and he came back, and then Damian… I let him come with me. I thought it would be okay. He said we were the best. Batman and Robin. I thought it was just another mission that would end like all the rest and instead I got him killed. Bruce never blamed me. Not like he did for…”

“Dying? Yeah. He doesn’t take that too well, does he? We’re not supposed to do that to him—the Robins. We’re supposed to survive. I wondered if he would love you less when you came back from that, but that didn’t happen, did it?”

“Did you want it to?” 

Not even to give Jason peace of mind is he willing to tell him about how badly Bruce beat him for dying in front of him; that is a trauma too deep to shine a light on, not his, but Bruce’s, because that’s what everyone forgets, that Bruce is a mass of scar tissue from all his losses, and the people who have the capacity to hurt him most are the ones he loves best. Dick has hurt him so many times without ever meaning to, but what Jason did to Bruce by dying is a soul-deep scar that will never, ever heal.

“I never know what I want. That’s what makes me such a fascinating guy to have around.”

Dick rolls over onto his back—carefully because of his bound arms. “So modest, too.”

Jason trails a finger down Dick’s bare chest. “You haven’t warned me off Drake yet.”

“I know you two have been hanging out together.”

“No lecture?”

“I figure it probably extends your life expectancy to have someone with you who looks before he leaps.”

“Are you saying Drake’s smarter than me?”

Dick snorts because it is so ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Tim is smarter than anyone. “Hell, yes.”

“Well, he may be the brains, but I have the brawn. You and him, you two goody-goodies, you don’t always get that sometimes what a mission needs isn’t all that smart-alec preparation. What it needs is a guy with guns, attitude, and a willingness to wreak fucking mayhem.”

Dick sends Tim a brief mental hug and a private hope that his patience can hold out if he has to do too much hand-holding of their most unreliable sibling. “Don’t get yourself killed in front of him. Tim’s been through enough.”

“I’m not the one who pretended to be dead when he wasn’t.”

Jason tugs Dick down the bed and Dick can’t decide if he never actually got soft after ejaculating or just has the recovery time of a superbly fit nineteen-year-old. “Some of us are past the five-times-a-night stage, you know.”

A hot mouth over his groin makes him gasp, spine arching in response as Jason murmurs indistinctly: “Doesn’t look that way from where I’m standing. Looks like some of us are as raring to go as the rest of us.”

Even if there is a camera somewhere in the room, and even if Bruce was originally looking at its screen to check that Jason wasn’t too angry to reason with, Dick is almost certain that Bruce would have turned it off once they got sweaty and naked. Definitely. Almost certainly definitely turned it off.

 _It doesn’t mean that we don’t also love each other as brothers…_ he offers it up tentatively to the man who won’t be watching. _Sometimes it just takes something extra to make a family work. You didn’t do anything wrong raising us, Bruce. There’s just no Westermarck Effect in place when you’re not related and you were never raised together. Even if Jason and I… Even if Jason and Tim… We all still love each other in the right sort of way. Trust me._

“I wish I knew if you really wanted this or if this is just you smoothing out the edges of our fucked-up family picnic blanket.”

“Can’t it be both?”

Jason strokes a hand up his thigh, testing the muscles of it, the ones that match his own because they were trained by the same man to do the same workouts and the proof of that is there in their bodies, the hard abdominal muscles, the flat stomachs, the long, lean hips. Dick is more flexible and Jason more ruthless, but one can tell at a glance that they were both raised by Bruce in so many ways that matter.

Jason’s mouth make a wry twist. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” He looms up, graceful as a predator, to pin Dick down, breathing into his neck and ear: “For they shall get thoroughly fucked.” His fingers slip in, pleased with what they find—the stretched, slick heat that his cock has made ready for them, and then a hip shove and the fingers are replaced by a cock very confident of its welcome. Dick grimaces because, damn, he’s big, and Jason smirks. 

“Sore?”

“No.”

“I know I’m a lot to handle. If you can’t take it, just sing out.”

“I can take any…” He is not going to be goaded into a stupid squabble about penis size. With dignity, Dick says, “It’s fine.”

“I guess that explains the ecstatic whimpering last time.”

Tim has a lot of patience but Dick isn’t certain that he deserves to have to use up his entire store dealing with Jason being this much of an asshole. On the whole, he thinks it is probably better that he takes the edge off Jason’s swaggering pirate impulses before he drives anyone else to murder.

“Can you dial the insufferable thing down a notch?”

“Not a chance, o-brother-mine-who-pretended-to-be-dead-when-he-wasn’t.”

“Hey, I’m far from being the first member of this family to come back from the dead.”

“But some of us weren’t lying…undercover…super-spy… _assholes_ …about it.”

Damn, Jason is good at this. The faux-careless thrusts are all too effective and he’s already having to swallow a moan of pleasure. Reparation has no right to feel this good. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have…” _Been like Bruce_.

The kiss is unexpected, swallowing the rest of his apology, tender, breath-stealing, slow; a real kiss this time, everything that is romantic. Jason lets him up for air with a last brush of lips against lips. Their eyes meet. “You can undo those ropes now,” Jason says. 

Dick realizes he has accidentally unknotted them while thinking of something else and holds them up apologetically. 

“Lie to me again and next time it will be chains and whips and probably a dungeon,” Jason warns him.

“Do I even want to know what porn you’re watching these days?”

“Dick, we grew up wearing fetish wear, running around following the orders of a leather-wearing bat guy, and getting caged up, chained up, and tied up by every crazy who ever escaped from Arkham. Why the hell would any of us need porn to develop sixteen different kinks before puberty?”

Dick says, “Speak for yourself…” and then gasps as Jason flips them expertly in a flex of honed muscles so that Dick is straddling his lap, Dick with his hands on Jason’s thighs to steady himself, while Jason holds him by the waist.

Jason smirks at him. “I bet Bruce is too uptight to let you show him just how flexible you really are. I bet he won’t even switch on the light. But, me, I’m all for a boyfriend who can swing from the ceiling fan. How about six impossible positions before breakfast? All that damned training ought to be good for some fun from time to time.”

Dick doesn’t bother mentioning that he always thought—and still does think—that catching bad guys is fun, because they all know about their adrenaline rushes when the night falls and the burglar alarms sound or the bat signal glows into the sky like a searchlight. He holds up his hands like a captive, balancing easily on the hard jut of Jason’s cock. “I’m making reparations here. You’re the one who needs to tell me what I need to do to be forgiven. I’m yours to command.”

Lunging forward, Jason catches him in a hot, needful kiss, then rolls them again, Dick underneath, Jason too turned on by Dick’s show of submission to be a smartass; he pins Dick flat, grabbing his wrists in his right hand and pressing them down onto the pillow, feeling the edge where the bonds rubbed the skin with his thumb, while pulling up Dick’s left leg, lunging in; needing this, still, too much; so many wounds and slights and confused resentments. Dick kisses him back and relaxes into the eager chaos of Jason trying to get to a place he is not going to reach yet; perhaps he never will; perhaps one day he’ll get there. If he doesn’t, it won’t be because Dick wasn’t willing him to find peace.

Jason says, “I forgive you, you dick, Dick. Don’t ever do it again.”

Dick opens his mouth to his plunging tongue then wraps a long lean leg around his back to steady his plunging thrusts. There is a breathy, needful gentleness to Jason’s moans now that wasn’t there before, anger gone from his voice and the touch of his hands; Dick opens up to all of it, even any residual resentments still lingering, like a boat on a storm-tossed sea, and feels true forgiveness pour into him from Jason’s hard, difficult body, salt and sweet and warm as mulled wine.


End file.
